In 1936, the Vuelta a España readied itself for just the second edition of the race. With the fog of the Spanish Civil War descending, it would be five years before the next.Some parts of that race are unrecognisable. It was mostly raced on gravel. The leader wore an orange jersey. Many riders were fuelled with brandy. But 90 years on, some of its tales resonate — and feel more relevant than ever.This is the story of one of the most remarkable and pathos-filled Grand Tours in history.“If you compare the Vuelta of 1936 to the other Grand Tours, it is probably equivalent to the Tour de France of 1904,” begins Juanfran de la Cruz, an author and historian of Spanish cycling. “Why? We are at the beginning of the story. The second Vuelta was for adventurers, for pioneers.“Imagine roads without pavements, the equivalent of Strade Bianche every day, and of course, apart from the big cities in the north of the country, the rest of the country linked to agriculture was very poor. Spain at that time was a country with a lot of problems, especially political problems. And ahead of that Vuelta, the mood was… let us say agitated. Every day there was a problem. It was horrible.”That February, the left-wing Popular Front narrowly won the general election — sending the army-aligned right wing into a fury. Over the coming months, the latter group, known collectively as the Nationalists and led by General Francisco Franco, launched a military coup. That, in turn, sparked a three-year civil war which Franco would win — and lead to half a million dead.The 1936 Vuelta was scheduled for May, just two months before the coup was launched, but stirrings of violence were already underway. Riots overtook Barcelona the day before the race’s start, but interior minister Santiago Casares Quiroga, a key government official, publicly called for the race to continue as a mark of unity.“It was a way to say: ‘We are Spaniards’, to create a collective Spanish feeling,” explains De la Cruz.The vast majority of Spanish riders backed the government side, known as the Republicans, but race organiser Juan Pujol, an openly pro-Nazi journalist who founded the race on behalf of his Informaciones newspaper, would become Franco’s head of propaganda and press that July.The previous year’s inaugural winner, Belgian Gustaaf Deloor, was back at the Vuelta again alongside his brother Alfons, but the real excitement came from the presence of Mariano Cañardo, the Spanish star who had finished second in 1935 and was expected to go one better.Known as the Catalan of Olite, having moved to Barcelona from his native Navarre as a teenager to escape a gruelling existence as a mountain shepherd, Cañardo worked as a carpenter to save up for his first racing bike worth some 300 pesetas (around $40 under pre-WW2 exchange rates) before joining FC Barcelona’s cycling team. A seven-time winner of his home race, the Volta a Catalunya, he was incredibly popular.Alfons Deloor (right) helped his brother Gustaaf retain his Vuelta title at the 1936 race (AFP via Getty Images)“But it was a disaster,” explains De la Cruz. “Crashes, mechanicals — it all went wrong. And Deloor was the stronger rider.”On stage one, a 210km route from Madrid to Salamanca, Cañardo fell and suffered numerous injuries, especially to his legs and head. Belgian Joseph Huts won the stage; the only day that Deloor would not wear the race leader’s orange jersey.One day later, heavy thunderstorms hit the race as it wove to Cáceres near the Portuguese border. Early on, an escaped dog ran into the road, triggering a huge crash amongst the peloton. Cañardo went down — while Deloor remained upright to win the stage, gaining nearly 16 minutes over his Catalan rival. Cañardo’s challenge appeared over.Instead it was another Spaniard, one hailing from Madrid rather than Barcelona, who emerged as the nation’s great hope. Julian Berrendero was a 24-year-old climber who had won his first major race at the Tour of Galicia the previous year. With riders competing in national teams, Berrendero was pressed into Cañardo’s service.With only a handful of stages left, Berrendero felt as if he had been unable to ride for himself once during the race — and set off up the road alongside compatriot Fermín Trueba, nicknamed El Mini for his stature.“We declared war on those around us,” Berrendero recalled in his autobiography years later, translated by British writer Tim Moore in his own book Vuelta Skelter. “What a furore. This was a real coup d’état, a revolution!”Trueba won the stage, but Berrendero soared up from eighth to fourth in the overall standings. Furious, Cañardo repeatedly attacked his teammate over the final days — to no avail. The pair fell out further after Berrendero refused to share his prize money with the rest of the Spanish team.“Fermín and I had earned more money in these two last stages than the rest of the team combined had won up to then; they expected us to split this income, but I had no intention of serving cash on a plate to those who didn’t deserve it,” Berrendero wrote.“Things degenerated. Cañardo and I exchanged blows, and because of that I had to leave the room, escorted by guards.”The Spanish team’s psychodrama drew attention away from Deloor’s achievement, who finished almost 12 minutes ahead of his brother to win the race.There was just one moment, on stage 11, in which his victory was in doubt. Deloor crashed at the same moment that his Belgian teammates attacked, but thanks to his brother Alfons waiting, Deloor was paced back to the group after a 50km chase.“It showed how high the level of Belgian cycling was,” says De la Cruz. “They also avoided so many more mechanicals, because of the quality of materials that they could access compared to the Spanish riders. It meant they had just jumped ahead of their rivals.”Conditions for racers in the 1930s were invariably tough (AFP via Getty Images)Gustaaf Deloor, for his part, told the newspapers that the Spanish riders were poor descenders — and fuelled mid-stage with alcoholic drinks, whilst the Flandrian preferred goat’s milk.Deloor lived an extraordinary life after his racing career. Three years after the 1936 Vuelta, he was serving in the Belgian Army as the country was occupied by Nazi Germany, and was sent to Stalag II-B, a prisoner of war camp, for the majority of the conflict. Emigrating to the United States in 1949, he found work designing rockets for the Marquardt Corporation — developing the engine used by NASA in the Apollo 11 Saturn V launch rocket that first landed men on the moon.But back in Spain, another conflict was even closer at hand. As the Nationalists launched a violent military coup, Cañardo and Berrendero entered the Tour de France. Berrendero won the King of the Mountains competition, dissolving into tears at the end of the race.“These tears came from something more profound than simple excitement, or even the absence of my loved ones: a deep nostalgia for my homeland, which was suffering the most cruel and tragic of all evils,” he wrote.Despite their rivalry, Berrendero and Cañardo were aligned. During that Tour, Cañardo expressed the team’s solidarity with “the children of the Spanish Republic”, as a personal friend of Catalan president Lluís Companys, executed by the Nationalists in 1940, and who Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium would be named after ahead of the 1992 Games.With the 1937 Vuelta cancelled amongst fierce fighting, Berrendero and his teammates laid low until that year’s Tour — the Spaniard opening a bike shop in the Pyrenean city of Pau as a Spanish exile. Berrendero won his first Tour stage in those peaks that July, claiming stage 15 after a brutal day of climbing which included ascents of the legendary Col du Tourmalet, Col d’Aspin, and Col de Peyresourde.Julian Berrendero alone on the Col du Tourmalet during the 1937 Tour de France (AFP via Getty Images)His triumph continued to antagonise the Nationalist leadership, by now in the ascendancy. The Spanish team swore solidarity to the Republican cause and pledged to donate half their winnings to war orphans, while Berrendero gave a punchy interview atop of the Tourmalet lambasting the political situation.Just as Iranian women’s footballers endured during this year’s Asian Cup, the world was watching every pronouncement from the Spanish riders. Berrendero thought he was safe when, in 1939, he slipped back across the border in the Basque town of Irun to see his family.Instead, he was arrested and immediately sent to a Nationalist concentration camp. At least 10,000 died in those prisons over the course of the civil war, many through executions, though the majority of historians say the true death toll was far higher.Berrendero was sent to a camp near Cadiz, where this autumn’s Vuelta will visit for the key stage 18 time trial. There, he was set to hard labour laying pavements, though as Berrendero tells it, he was saved from a worse fate by the camp’s captain, once an amateur cyclist, who recognised the former champion — and by offering the rider his breakfast, gave him his first proper meal in a year.In March 1941, Berrendero was released — and immediately sought to reestablish his racing career. Organised by the Francoist cultural department Educación y Descanso (Education and Recreation), the 1941 Vuelta, held in June, only featured riders from Spain and neutral Switzerland due to the ongoing World War Two.At 4,409km (compared to 3,275km in 2026), the 1941 edition was the longest Vuelta in history. Taking victory on stage one in Salamanca, Berrendero established a superiority he never ceded — and after 168 hours of riding, became the first Spanish victor of the Vuelta.The victory of such a public critic, after 18 months of imprisonment, was an embarrassment to Franco’s regime.Berrendero’s win in 1942 was even more absolute — by almost nine minutes, and having worn the leaders jersey for the entire race. Just two other riders in Vuelta history (Freddy Maertens in 1977 and Tony Rominger in 1994) achieved the same feat.Despite the success, under the oppressive environment, Berrendero was forced to keep his political leanings quiet.“His ideas stayed in his mind,” says De la Cruz. “Day by day, he had to survive.”Despite a second overall finish at the 1945 Vuelta, Berrendero’s career began to wane. Franco’s regime took a final revenge by removing his racing license after the 1949 Tour, deeming the Spanish team to have disgraced the nation after they withdrew en-masse due to mechanical issues — and the better prize money on offer at the Volta a Portugal.It meant Berrendero faded into near obscurity, to run a bike shop in the Madrid suburbs — while the Vuelta, bolstered by the right-wing government’s desire to use the race as a mid-20th century form of sportswashing, went from strength to strength, establishing itself as the third Grand Tour.“From the point of view of the politicians, after 15 years of being a closed country it (Spain) started to open,” explains De la Cruz. “It entered the UN, it started to receive tourists, the country started to improve — and the Vuelta was a tool to show that.“Maybe the problem for Berrendero was both the Civil War, but also because if you compare to the Giro and Tour, they both had home winners. The Vuelta’s first was a Belgian — so Berrendero isn’t as well known.”Ninety years on from Berrendero’s emergence, and twelve years on from Alberto Contador’s most recent win, a Spaniard in Enric Mas lies on the verge of winning the Vuelta once again. As last year’s race demonstrated, the Vuelta has always been political.